At roughly the same time that Roberts was engaged in his
labors, Joseph Smith III and the RLDS apostle Herman Smith (1850-1919) began
work on The History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. Published in four volumes between 1897 and 1903, it covered the
period until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1934, Herman Smith's
daughter Inez Smith Davis (1889-1954) condensed that history into her own The
Story of the Church, taking the narrative up through the presidency of
Frederick Madison Smith. In 1943 and 1948, she expanded the book to take it up
to the present day.
Comparing the histories produced by the writers of the Manuscript
History and Roberts with the two Smiths and Davis reveals that all these
narratives are what might be called denominational histories. They are written
first what the authors perceived to be the interest and identity of their
denominations in mind. Thus, Roberts’s work draws upon the LDS perception of
persecution of polygamy, setting his church against a presumably corrupt
American culture. He elevates Joseph Smith’s own suffering, emphasizes that
other Americans consistently rejected and persecuted Mormons, and links that
persecution to practices like polygamy, the Law of Consecration, and building
temples. For Roberts, then, persecution is a sign of Joseph Smith’s
independence, inspiration, and access to divine truth.
Just so, the RLDS authors seek to downplay the beliefs
and practices of Joseph Smith Jr. that inspired opposition among non-Mormons. .
. . In the mid-twentieth century, this denominational history began to be
displaced. (Matthew Bowman, Mormonism [Cambridge Elements: New Religious
Movements; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024], 46-47)
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